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PrintBook Review: Old Time Rodeo
Celebrate a bygone era with this collection of vintage photographs and stories about the daring and dangerous world of rodeo.
Old Time Rodeo
Lorin Sorensen
www.oldtimerodeo.com
EnlargeAnyone who attends the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas knows how big the sport has become. And yet its current status is nothing compared to the early 20th century, when there were rodeos every 50 miles throughout the West drawing crowds that rivaled the annual county fair.
Lorin Sorensen celebrates this bygone era in Old Time Rodeo: The Way It Was, a collection of vintage photographs and stories about the daring and dangerous world of rodeo. Or as trick rider Montie Montana Jr. describes it in his foreword, "the most fun you can have with a cowboy hat on."
From the foundation laid by Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Shows in the late 1800s, to the 1940s and '50s when stars like Gene Autry and Slim Pickens were part of the rodeo scene, and on through the establishment of the sport's top showcases at Cheyenne, Pendleton, and Calgary, Sorensen captures both the romance of the era and the unique personalities of the athletes and performers who preserved America's cowboy heritage in spite of the encroachment of modern times.
The text is a fine primer on rodeo history, but it is the photographs of legends like Yakima Canutt and 1951 Rodeo Queen Dianne Goldman — as well as U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein — that truly make Old Time Rodeo indispensable.
